The Servile State and the Road to Serfdom look more prescient all the time

Medieval peasants got a lot more vacation time than you do.

The author, being a typically ignorant Late Modern, manages to paint the Church’s insistence on leisure for the poor as a cynical crowd control measure rather than as an act of mercy running interference between the weak and those who exploit them, but the point is that yeah, in Christendom, the goal was to cut the poor slack.

In modernity, particularly in the past thirty years, we have managed to erect a system primarily ordered toward defending the strong from the weak, while making the vast majority of our citizens poorer and poorer, working longer and longer, for fewer and fewer returns. The goal, of course, is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, with fewer and fewer ties of responsibility to the people they exploit.

And when the middle class complain of this, they are accused of being Communists or socialists. That game will only work so long. Sooner or later, something will have to give.